1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to manufacturing and, in particular, to methods and systems for facilitating the manufacturing of personalized products by a vendor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Product customization is popular within many retail markets. Customers may add personalized features to a wide variety of products, including, but not limited to, greeting cards, T-shirts, hats, and golf balls. The personalization itself may take many forms, such as the product size, shape and color, and the location, size, shape and color of added text, graphics, images, audio or videos.
The personalization options presented to the customer are often quite limited. For example, a customer designing a personalized greeting card may be required to make a series of discrete text selections, each text selection coming from a limited number of prewritten choices. Or, if the customer is allowed to create his or her own text, it may be limited to a preset number of characters. Such limitations necessarily constrain the ability of customers to fully express themselves via the resulting personalized products.
Computer hardware and software developed for home use now provides a new source of text and graphics that may be incorporated into personalized products. Customers may use applications such as Adobe Illustrator™, Paint Shop Pro™, and Corel Photo-Paint™ to create digital images for this purpose. The images created with these applications, however, often possess different spatial resolution and include a different number of color capabilities than may be handled by the manufacturer of the personalized product. Furthermore, the size, shape, or format of the digital image may fail to correspond with the product to be personalized or the needs of the manufacturer. For a particular digital image or multimedia file, these limitations may preclude the vendor from producing a personalized product that utilizes that digital image or multimedia item, or at least result in a product that is unsatisfactory to the customer.
Similarly, word processors such as Microsoft Word™ and Corel WordPerfect™ provide users with hundreds or even thousands of different typestyles for text. Many of these fonts, however, may be incompatible with the needs of the manufacturers of the personalized product.
Additionally, each manufacturer or vendor of a product has its own job ticket format. This job ticket describes the job to be performed by the vendor. It includes such details as where an image is to be placed, what the image is, what text is to be placed, where the text is to be placed, what product is to be personalized, what color is the product, where is the product to be shipped, and to whom should the product be addressed. The personalized product can be expressed in multiple formats: images and text can be in multiple formats, describing where on a product an image or text is to be placed can be described in various ways. Thus, regardless of the format in which a customer presents its personalized product, that format should be converted to a format readable to a vendor for production of that personalized product to occur.